I’ve been painting a lot. Well, a lot more than I have been, on average, over the last few years. In fact, it’s really supplanting sculpture and other kinds of art production as the thing I WANT to do. Which feels good. And I will get to writing more about my art in a minute, but first a few musings and observations…
Not too long ago I visited a big, beautiful, world-class museum of modern art north of Copenhagen which is called, somewhat strangely, the Louisiana Museum. I visited with Christina and Kodiak and my mother, and among other exhibitions we saw a show of paintings by Swiss painter Franz Gertsch. Although his later work includes traditional portraiture and monochrome paintings of flowers, he became famous for large-scale photorealistic paintings of young people doing mundane things. I had a rather complicated reaction to these.
It's obvious that Gertsch took photographs of people doing stuff, and then painted them faithfully at a very large scale. The paintings just look like really big photos. My first reaction was: This is boring. Why not just print these as really big photographic prints? What is gained by turning these images into paintings? When you don’t add anything, when you don’t interpret, then you’re not really showing the audience anything about yourself, and so what’s the point? Maybe the only reason Gertsch chose to paint these images really large was that painting gets you into the art world… in a way that photography doesn’t… and painting really large is cool. Because not many people do it.
This is one of his most famous paintings. It is HUGE... about 13 x 19 feet.
So I left the museum that day feeling that I really didn’t like his work. Or I didn’t get it. But I did have one further thought, a few days later, that somewhat tempered all this judgmentalism. My thought was basically that, when an artist chooses one image from among thousands to elevate through the act of painting it or printing it, the artist is engaging in a kind of “communication by curation.” In other words, the very act of choosing a particular image tells us about what the artist values or finds interesting or beautiful. It’s the same type of communication a photographer uses. And when you look at a large sample of work like this, like a big show of one person’s work, you can get a deeper and more nuanced feeling for what the artist wants to say. Gertsch presumably wanted to communicate that “youthful energy is cool”, or something like that. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that his decision to make these snapshots into huge paintings amounts to a kind of stunt… designed to gain entry into the art world. Apparently it worked really well.
Contemporary art in Sweden confounds me. My sense is that it seems to be creeping its way back towards abstraction, by way of identity. What I mean is that every painting or sculpture seems to have a back-story which allegedly reveals some deep truth about the artist’s identity, but the artworks themselves are always totally obtuse, non-sensical abstract shapes, often vaguely referencing plants or animals, made from odd materials. As a whole, the art on display here seems totally afraid of saying anything in direct terms.
Two artworks from recent high-profile shows in Sweden. No offence to the artists... but these pieces do illustrate my point nicely!
In light of the fact that Sweden is considered an ‘advanced’ culture, there is a temptation to think that the society has moved ‘beyond’ debased categories like representation and figurative art to something more enlightened. But I have my doubts. My sneaking suspicion is that there is a deep-seated fear in the cultural heart of this place which is driving the type of art here… a fear of offending someone or of taking a stand.* And at the end of the day, abstraction is abstraction, and it’s just as boring now as it was in the 1960’s. I read a quote somewhere in which a figurative artist in the 1960’s was defending his choice of subject matter against the tidal wave of abstraction surrounding him, and he said something like “I choose to paint the one subject that actually has enduring meaning, through history.” Preach it, brother!
I’ve been devouring books about painters. My current favorites are Odd Nerdrum, Akseli Gallen-Kallela (a Finnish painter who lived a while in Taos!), and John Currin (who is not only a distant acquaintance of mine, but who also, I recently learned, is the richest artist in the whole world! I had no idea!) Nerdrum in particular is amazing. I find his paintings a little depressing, I guess, but his technique is spectacular and he is totally committed to the human figure and its universal and timeless meaning. Good stuff.
I’ve noticed a funny thing about the evolution of my attitude towards my own painting, and it’s most easily explained by talking about my figure drawings. When I first started figure drawing about 5 years ago in Taos, I was certain that every drawing was going to be a masterpiece. I bought really nice paper and nice charcoal drawing pencils, and went in with high expectations. After making really awful drawings for weeks and weeks and weeks, I gradually came around to understanding that every drawing is basically just practice. You get better slowly, and once in a while you get lucky and make a good drawing, but it’s basically just one long practice session. I’ve had the same experience with painting. Every painting now just feels like an opportunity to make some new and unexpected mistake… a mistake I hopefully won’t repeat. So I slowly get better, but every painting is a big failure in some way or another.
This is the first painting I made in my new studio.
I love the pose… it’s exactly what I wanted… but almost everything else is problematic. I learned a LOT of lessons on this one.. and I may still go back to it and make improvements or corrections.
Here is the second one.
It’s a bit better.
I’m almost done with a third, but because I’m only almost done, I won’t be showing it just yet. And I have the image for a fourth one already transferred to the stretched canvas, ready to start. I'm starting to actually enjoy painting. I love holing up in my studio, not noticing as the hours fly by. But soon I’m going to have to start doing the much less fun job of trying to find a gallery, or a get into a show, or brainstorm some other way of getting these paintings out into the world. I'll certainly try a few galleries in Sweden, but with the aforementioned local zeitgeist of obtuse abstraction, my hopes aren't high. I'm not afraid of branching out to Copenhagen or Berlin or New York, or...?
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OK… the political situation in the States. And the world.
This last section, about politics, was originally longer and angrier. I think that I was able to expunge much of my anger just by writing that first version, and I’m not sure I see the point of publishing all that spit and vinegar. It should suffice to say that I absolutely, unequivocally hate trump. I think he is a dangerous man and he will take America, and possibly the world, in an ugly direction. In response to his recent election, I am stunned, angry, disappointed, sad and scared. I am scared for America, and Ukraine, and Europe, and the planet, and the future.
There are SO many reasons not to vote for him, but I’ll mention just two.
The climate crisis. That fucking baboon doesn’t believe in climate change. Doesn’t BELIEVE in it!! (Remember how he didn’t believe in Covid either? What an Idiot.) How could anyone who has children, or gives a shit at all about future generations, have voted for him?
Women’s rights. Trump is a fucking convicted rapist! WHY DO CONSERVATIVES NOT CARE ABOUT THIS? And many of his appointees thus far are also accused of rape or sexual assault (Hegseth, Gaetz, and RFK Jr., among others). Abortion bans, Republicans' pet project, are already causing radically increased maternal mortality. Acceptable collateral losses in the culture war, I guess.
I could go on. And on… and on. He’s a failed business man who gambled and lost all his daddy’s money, yet people “trust him on the economy.” He’s a non-stop liar… lying an average of 21 times PER DAY in his first term. How could anyone vote for this guy?
I do have my theories about why people do it. I won’t explain them in detail, but like most human failings I think it mostly comes down to psychology.
So, regarding the next four years in the US… what the fuck? Keep your head down and pray for cancer.
Revenge fantasy, anyone? (I love this image!)
And on the topic of the worldwide shift towards authoritarianism in general… I mean… who knows. It’s certainly disconcerting. But also understandable in a way. Skyrocketing income inequality and war and global warming (all of which, incidentally, are disproportionately caused by the political right) are all pushing up immigration and intensifying competition for resources, which plays well for the ‘strong’ right. But their policies are just not long-term solutions. The right-wing approach, across the world, is basically “Let’s enact policies to make things better for us, our in-crowd who look and think like us, and fuck everyone else, including women, immigrants, gays, poor people, and all members of all future generations.” The whole thing is just about power. It's gross.
The short-term outlook is certainly grim. I guess my only hope is that this wave of authoritarianism will backfire so badly, with such negative repercussions for regular people (mothers dying in Texas, for instance), that it will pave the way for a more humane and compassion-based future. I'm not optimistic... but I continue to be hopeful. Moving to Sweden seems like a good idea… in this context at least!
OK, I've already slowed way down on reading the news, and hopefully I won't have to write about politics again any time soon.
Lots of love to all of you.
Keep trying to make the world more beautiful, in whatever way suits you.
Hugs
* Regarding my comments above on Franz Gertsch and the Swedish art scene, I know I'm being a bit snobbish and dogmatic. I understand that art comes in many flavors and can can be successful even in the simplest of ways, like being beautiful or bringing joy. But I also feel like artists - especially those artists enshrined in world-class museums - should be communicating something meaningful, or personal. And for the record, I'm basically agnostic on all this stuff, which is to say that if someone came along and provided me with believable evidence on why all the aforementioned art is actually really great, I'm open to being convinced.
I'm also in the funny position of having never studied art, and needing to give myself an art education and develop my own system of art values comparatively late in life. I'm too old to screw around with art that doesn't speak to me.
